In our discussions about what will happen in the digital marketing industry during the next 12 months, one overarching trend emerged: The basic rules of brand building are just as important for innovations in the digital space as they are for traditional forms of communication.

Using new technology won't in itself bring success; your digital communications still need to be creative, engaging and relevant if they are to cut it during the second decade of this century. Here are the first five of our top 10 trends for 2010. (We'll post the next five here tomorrow.)

Online display: Don't be blinded by the shiny and new.
In 2010, advertisers will experiment with new, larger ad formats. These formats may be initially attractive because they are different, but the basics of brand building beyond awareness shouldn't be ignored. Most of the new formats perform very well in the short term. Dynamic Logic has previously reported the high performance (brand impact) of video ads when they were first introduced. They found that video ad performance, relative to average ad performance, declined over a two year period following introduction as the novelty wore off. We'd expect this to be true for most of the new, larger ad formats and their progeny.

Ultimately, over the next several years only the fittest for these larger formats will survive. If they prove too intrusive, they may make people less favorable toward the advertised brand or the website on which they are served. Other advertisers and agencies will use these formats more cautiously, taking note of creative best practices gleaned from prior work.

Viral video will move from art to science.
As online video consumption continues to rise, advertisers increasingly value viral viewings as a clear and visible sign that their campaigns are engaging audiences. In response, viral video analytics are becoming sophisticated. YouTube has enhanced its video analytics offer, and companies such as Visible Measures and Unruly Media are providing comprehensive viral monitoring services across multiple online video platforms.

This information will fuel a more scientific approach to viral campaign planning. Rather than just place videos online and hope an audience will come, advertisers will invest in viral seeding strategies. They'll promote their videos via online influencers, Facebook video-sharing applications and targeted, paid placements. Advertisers will also become smarter about developing and selecting ads with the most viral video potential before they employ the seeding. A recent calibration exercise for Millward Brown's Link pre-test, for example, identified the creative factors which explain most of the variation seen in levels of viral viewing.

While there are likely to still be more misses than hits in the viral space, the opportunity of being next year's T-Mobile "Dance" or Evian's roller babies is something many marketers will plan for.

Gaming gets more social and mobile.
The ability to access Twitter and Facebook from the Xbox game system is one sign console gaming is becoming a lot more social. Games such as "Uncharted 2" already allow you to tweet your progress from within the game and we anticipate seeing these features implemented in more games. Microsoft's Project Natal promises to bring even more interactivity to gaming by supplanting controllers with your actual body movements, improving immensely on a model created by Nintendo. Perhaps the most promising and category-busting idea appears to be OnLive, a games-on-demand service that allows you to play any console or PC game on your TV or computer, without the need for a console at all.

Gaming's reach is already significant -- "Modern Warfare 2" is the biggest entertainment launch ever -- but the social elements are going to make the growth exponential. The proliferation of mobile games such as Doodle Jump for the iPhone, which allows the user to interact with other players, brings gaming to the masses.

Dynamic Logic's research has already shown that gaming can be very effective in increasing brand metrics. As interactivity increases and gaming becomes ubiquitous, we expect more advertisers to enter this space. For example, in the fall of 2010, Disney will launch "Epic Mickey" for the Nintendo Wii, the first major communication vehicle for a significant repositioning of this much-loved global brand.

Mobile takes a bite out of online.
According to the Mobile Marketing Association, total U.S. spend on mobile marketing will grow from $1.7 billion this year to $2.16 billion in 2010. Google's $750 million purchase of mobile ad network Admob reinforces that 2010 will be a significant year for mobile. We expect to see more consolidation in the mobile space.

With Apple's iPhone, Google's Android and RIM's BlackBerry platforms making the smartphone choices more attractive to consumers and cost of access slowly coming down, mobile web usage numbers will increase. The iPhone alone has now reached 57 million units worldwide, the fastest uptake in the history of technology. The real innovation will be increased adoption of the next-generation mobile browsers that will make the mobile web look and feel more like the applications we know today.

While web-based mobile, despite its growth, still only reaches a relatively small number of people, this niche audience can be particularly attractive to some brands and we've seen many targeting successes. Mobile provides the ability to target by site, phone model, demographics and location, all of which can be useful to advertisers. In addition, Dynamic Logic's normative advertising effectiveness data already suggests that mobile is two to five times better at driving brand metrics than online, and we expect this differential to remain consistent in 2010.

All of this means that mobile may well start to take ad dollars which would previously have been spent online. Since it's a new medium, there remains some consumer resistance to mobile advertising, so we advertisers will initially favor the soft-sell approach of providing useful content in this space, rather than pushing hard-sell messaging.

Here I am. Over here!
The promise that technology would enable automated direct-marketing messages to be pushed to consumers with GPS-enabled mobile devices has yet to come to fruition. Consumers are understandably reluctant to broadcast their location randomly or to be interrupted by unexpected messages without their consent. Instead we're seeing a variety of innovative solutions created to facilitate geo-targeting of marketing messages (when in-aisle, in-store or in-proximity) as the number of GPS-enabled devices continues to rise.

Services such as the mobile game FourSquare contain a social-media element that allows users to broadcast their location to a network of friends and other users in their respective cities. The social element of this voluntary disclosure has allowed marketers to tap into an engaged network of users and offer special promotions based on reported location. We expect FourSquare and other apps with a hybrid location/social-networking component to grow significantly in 2010.

We also expect to see utility-focused location applications gain popularity on GPS-enabled mobile devices during 2010. ComScore has reported that 11% of their mobile panel is currently using map or direction-based applications on their devices, representing 41% year-on-year growth and potentially stealing market share from standalone GPS devices. How these applications are eventually monetized remains to be seen, but the "Minority Report" scenario of "push" location-based advertising is starting to become a reality through voluntary user disclosure of location.

Even if consumers won't share their location with brands, brands can share their locations with consumers. In this vein, marketers will increasingly make location a feature of their campaigns, as the recent Levi's Twitter promotion in Australia demonstrates.

From: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/advertisingAge/Digital/~3/gR498Gl4slA/post.php

What have been the most significant issues for search in 2009?

Ciaran Norris, Head of Social Media at Mindshare:

Twitter's tip into the mainstream, and the subsequent rush towards real-time search, has seen social and search collide like never before. Whilst I'm not convinced that the current Google/Twitter interface will stay, the thought behind it is the interesting thing.

On another note, the struggle by media companies to work out whether or not they want to be searchable anymore could have a profound impact on content over the coming years.

Will Critchlow, Director of Distilled:

I think with hindsight we will say that the increase in personalisation (and particularly Google's roll-out of personalisation even to non-signed-in users) will be viewed as the most significant event. It's really the end of the '#1 ranking' and it opens up an amazing array of new marketing tactics, especially for big brands.

Andrew Girdwood, Head of Search at Bigmouthmedia:

It’s hard not to talk about Bing when we examine what significant search events occurred in 2009. Even if you’re not a fan of Bing, even if you think Google will wipe the floor with Bing you would be wrong to suggest that Bing’s not had a visible influence on Google. If it was not for Bing we would likely still be waiting for Google to push its own real-time search and Twitter integration.

One of the areas search is growing is around personal identity. Google’s started to automatically personalise web search results. This is huge. Google and Facebook have been battling it out with competing “Connection” services; or universal logins. These are a corner stone to both companies' social media and personal targeting ambitions.

Kevin Gibbons, Director of Search at SEOptimise:

Personally from a UK search perspective I think one of the biggest issues in 2009 wasGoogle’s broken UK search results. It’s very rare that an algorithm update from Google reduces the relevancy or quality of search results, especially over such widespread results and for a long period of time.

This has generated a lot of attention and caused many headaches for UK SEOs trying to figure out why their sites/clients are listed behind US and Australian sites when searching in Google UK!

Despite the changes Google have been rolling out recently, I don’t think you can look past the Microsoft/Yahoo deal as the most significant event of the year. A realistic competitor to Google has been long-overdue, especially in the UK where they have such a dominant market share. Potentially the deal could make a significant impact to how advertisers allocate their online advertising budgets. So once Bing and adCenter replace Yahoo search it’s likely online marketers will be taking Bing far more seriously for organic and paid search strategies.

Shane Quigley, CEO at Epiphany:

As well as Bing's inclusion of Twitter search capability and Google's wide-scale rollout of universal search, 2009 has shown us that social factors will play a major role in 2010.

It is clear to me that the Vince update aimed at identifying brands was also a step towards monitoring social barometers to measure popularity. Things like tweets, brand mentions, links, images, videos and product reviews will all play a part in Googles future algorithm calculations.

What will be the major search trends in 2010?

Ciaran Norris:

I think that next year will see the continued convergence of technologies and channels, particularly TV, mobile, search & social. The real-time search movement will continue in some way, shape or form, though the engines still need to perfect ranking & filtering.

The continued rise of mobile web, pulling in GPS & augmented reality, means that people will expect geo-results. And as TV gets webbed up (Yahoo TV Widgets etc...) people searching and chatting on and around shows will become a new way of reaching people, or at least learning about what they want.

Will Critchlow:

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that I think 2010 will see the beginnings of a backlash against Google. There have been murmurings for some time among the tech community about their all-pervading presence, ambition to gather everyone's data for their own marketing purposes and effective monopoly.

It wouldn't surprise me to see them take a step too far and face political push-back over their expansion into the desktop and mobile phone markets. If they use market power in one arena to manipulate another, that's classic monopolistic behaviour. Personally, I'd love to see Bing gain some market share. I think a strong competitor would ultimately benefit everyone.

Andrew Girdwood:

We’ll see continued improvements in visual search. Google Goggles is one example but we’ll also see mobile applications that effect an augmented reality that combine search and location-aware search. These will let searchers show the engines what they want help with and get back results.

Privacy will also be a hot issue in 2010. Targeting becomes ever more important to companies and yet the ability not to be targeted becomes ever more important to people. It seems impossible that we’ll avoid tension on this front.

Of particular interest will be looking beyond the last click. DoubleClick offers Click Path Analysis. Atlas offers User Engagement Mapping. There will be other offerings from alternative technology providers who wish to remain competitive against these search engine owned offerings. 2010 will see sites wrestle with tagging and tracking but invest in the required technology in 2010 with the ambition of not having to return to this fight for a while.

As real-time search helps surface social media sites in the blink of an eye the aspects of ‘search’, ‘marketing’, ‘public relations’ and even ‘customer care’ will all get drawn together. We’ll see different types of agencies pitching against one another for the first time. We’ll see corporate departments defending their turf and fighting for budget against their colleagues across the hall.

Kevin Gibbons:

Google page speed is going to have an influence over organic rankings in 2010 and is likely to have a strong impact on designers/developers as well as SEO’s. At the moment there are unanswered questions, such as how heavily will slow sites be penalised? Will fast sites be boosted in the search engines? So it will be interesting to see the impact this has.

Now that the Microsoft/Yahoo deal is now all tied-up, advertisers will need to start thinking seriously about Bing’s more sizeable market share and start to prepare for when this is integrated with Yahoo search.

Google Wave has been slowly rolled out to users so far during 2009, this has a lot of potential which is unlikely to be truly realised until it reaches a greater audience. There’s a lot of uncertainly about how popular Google Wave will become at the moment, so it will be very interesting to see if this can really take off in 2010. I’m sure they’ll be new social media sites coming onto the scene too, along with developments to many of the current top social media sites; Twitter business accounts, for example, will be a good one to look out for.

Shane Quigley:

Rumoured for a while, and discovered live on the web by a clever person over at Gizmodo, there is a new Google Interface on the way for 2010. Being referred to as the three panel layout this change will mean it will become increasing important to rank highly in Image, Video and other search results as Google gives more prominence to these sections within its interface.

Real Time search has huge implications in terms of brand protection, what results people will click, as well as creating new opportunities to rank. Google also announced earlier this month that everyone’s search results are now being personalised (to an extent) based on your previous search behaviour, regardless of whether you’re logged in or not. Are the days of the ranking report now truly numbered?

Changes will come thick and fast as Google look to hold market share and the new Caffeine architecture should give them the processing power to do a lot more with their search application.

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I always believed that brand suicide was essentially the result of some major foot-in-mouth event, or a product fail of epic proportions. Moreover, it was not so much the failure itself, but rather the result of not being able to manage and recover from that failure. There’s a right way and a wrong way to dig your brand out of a hole.

But this big picture stuff isn’t the only way brands die. When it comes down to it brands die at a micro level. Brand suicide occurs whenever an individual has ‘had it’ with a company, be that the result of shoddy treatment, or disappointment with products and services.

Normally when this happens to me I tell people about it, in the strongest possible terms. That used to be a relatively limited group of people, but nowadays I can (and do) communicate my annoyance / misery on Twitter, which gives any disgruntled customer a lot more reach. And as such the world is a scarier place for brands than ever before.

The vast social media echo chamber means that brands are now at real danger from lots of small events, rather than one big one. We are living in an age where brands die by 1,000 cuts, rather than one almighty chop. The rise in popularity of social / user-generated platforms like Facebook, Digg, Twitter, YouTube and Wikipedia means that brands are more exposed than ever.

So how can brands go about killing themselves slowly?

Spamfail. Everybody hates spam, which comes in many forms including emails, blog comments, social media spam, search engines spam, and old school spam such as junk mail. Too much of a bad thing is always a bad thing. Here are 10 ways to avoid spam.

Faking it. Speaking of spam, some of the most ill-advised spam campaigns have involved company executives. Take Whole Foods CEO John Mackey, who – over a seven year period - posted anonymous comments on Yahoo’s stock market forums to criticise a competitor (while calling himself ‘cute’ in the process). Funny and embarrassing in equal measure. And also deceptive: the comments prompted an SEC investigation. He was cleared, he apologised (kind of), but the damage was done.

Executive foot in mouth. John Mackey also ‘did a Gerald Ratner’ a few months ago by saying that his organic superstore “sells junk”. Ratner, a jewellery tycoon, almost caused the collapse of his company in the late-1980s after describing his products as “total crap”. Journalists simply love stories like this.

Inappropriate hashtag piracy on Twitter. Hopping onto a trending hashtag can be a good idea, but you need to be creative and contextual. Otherwise things can get weird, as Habitat found out when an ‘intern’ responsible for the firm’s Twitter output decided to promote the firm by jumping onto threads relating to the protests in Iran.

Hey, loyal customer: screw you. Nothing smarts more than insurance premiums being raised for no good reason, especially when you’ve stayed with the insurer for years. Shouldn’t my premium fall? It’s the same with mobile operators, where customer churn is a massive issue, and for many other firms too. It’s madness, frankly, especially as it typically costs far less to retain a customer than to acquire a new one. So why do businesses penalise loyal customers while offering new ones amazing deals? I’d wager that it’s linked to the way bonuses are paid, as much as anything. The sooner we move on from that the better. Businesses need to evolve into retention-focused operations, where staff are rewarded on the basis of customer loyalty, satisfaction and profitability, rather than sales.

Punish tiny indiscretions. True story: back in 2002 I was placed on an ‘arrears plan’ by Vodafone after missing just one lousy payment, the first time I had done so in three or four years. With an unblemished payment history up until that point I couldn’t understand it, but I was assured that there was no room for movement. Annoyingly the ‘arrears plan’ meant that a black mark was added to my credit file. As such I left Vodafone almost immediately and shall never return.

Over-promise, under-deliver. After leaving Vodafone I was enticed towards 3, the UK mobile operator with the first 3G network. Unfortunately something went badly wrong and the handset I was sent refused to send a text message for the best part of six months. So much for the joys of 3G. I spent around 30 hours on the phone trying to resolve the issue, and now have a mortal fear of Norah Jones (the hold music).

Customer service fail. Where to start with this one? I’ll do almost anything, including ignoring a problem that costs me money every month, just to avoid calling the customer service centre. This visualisation, called ‘Why I’d rather be punched in the testicles than call customer service’, perfectly illustrates why call centres suck so badly.

Kick the shit out of a Good Samaritan. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Ryanair vs blogger. Constructive criticism is part and parcel of the world we live in. You can take it personally, as Ryanair did (backed up, amazingly, by its PR department who put out a statement along the lines of: “lunatic bloggers can have the blog sphere all to themselves as our people are too busy driving down the cost of air travel”) or you can take it on the chin and fix up those problem areas.

Do the heavy-handed PR / legal thing. The world has irreversibly changed, and old school wool-pulling – and threats – don’t seem to work so well anymore. I am of course referring to the Trafigura scandal and subsequent attempt to hush things up. A superinjunction was imposed on The Guardian but the crowd came to the rescue, with bloggers and Twitter users standing up for free speech. This PR / legal spin has been an utter disaster for all involved, and it had the opposite effect of quietening the press (it trended on Twitter for a couple of days). The takeway here is that transparency is the only way of protecting a brand under fire.

Crap advertising. “Mum, I want to do a poo.” Discuss...

Horrific advertising. I’m all for edgy, but the decision to drape models over Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe for a recent EasyJet brochure was jaw-droppingly stupid.

Intrusive advertising. Here’s a fact: if you commission pop-ups, you totally suck andeverybody hates you.

[Image by Pascal PirateChickan]

Launch a rubbish website. It’s obviously not going to be a good thing for your brand, is it? Instead of naming and shaming I’m going to simply point you at Vincent Flanders. Tell us how it is, Vince…

Launch a rubbish, inaccessible website. Some people will hate your website because it has a shocking user experience. Meanwhile others will hate it because they can’t use it. Why would you want to alienate customers or prospects? Mac owners, sight-impaired people and the 80+ generation are all internet users, and there are lots of them. Flash websites are some of the worst offenders, as major retailers have found to their embarrassment.

Bastardise your brand identity. Completely. Changing the look and feel of your brand is always a little bit dangerous, even when it is necessary. Do too much, too soon, and you might have a problem. Consider what happened with British Airways when it redesigned the tail fins on all of its aircraft, replacing the Union Jack with ‘world art’, at a cost of £60m. Cue a massive public outcry. Despite this it took the company four years to ditch the ‘ethnic liveries’. Moral: be careful when messing with your brand’s appearance.

Ignore a major / killer problem with your products. What use are bike locks that can be opened with a biro? Or what about cars that kill people due to accelerator pedals sticking? Obviously no consumer in their right mind would risk buying these products. Product recalls can be horrendously expensive btu if you know there’s a problem then it’s better to deal with the situation sooner rather than later (the longer you leave it, the worse the problem gets, and the more the brand becomes tarnished).

Introduce ridiculous charges. Banks are some of the worst offenders but once again there’s no need to look any further than Ryanair, which is surely the king of silly charges (although they often result in lots of noise in the press, which I imagine may be part of the grand plan). Ryanair charges £5 simply to book a ticket via credit card. It charges if you take a bag with you, and also if you don’t. It even considered charging passengers to use the toilet (seriously).

Rubbish delivery. Online retailers are judged not only by their websites and prices, but also by service, and that means – by and large – the ability to deliver on-time and without charging astronomical fees. Consumer expectations are sharper than ever in this area. Retailers cannot expect someone to wait at home all day simply to receive some oversized package, purchased via the internet. The retailer may blame the courier, but the consumer will apportion a fair amount of blame to the retailer.

Sack the wrong people. You can lose a lot of respect by firing the wrong people. For example Microsoft recently let Don Dodge go, as part of a bigger wave of layoffs. In the eyes of the startup community this was a serious blunder, which was perhaps exacerbated by the fact that Google picked him up within 90 minutes of him clearing his desk.

Burying your head in the sand. If there's one surefire way of committing brand suicide then it's to ignore problems and bad noise. Reputation monitoring is essential these days. I'm not saying you should reply to every single tweet that mentions your brand, but certainly you can reply to those people who say something negative. If you choose not to then that's your call, but if you say you "can't possibly reply to everybody" then you're very probably wrong. Remember that a problem is really an opportunity to surpass customer expectations, and to drive loyalty through quality service.

What did I miss? I'm sure there are dozens more ways of harming your brand... leave your ideas and pointers below...

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The prime real estate of any website is above the fold — the portion of the page that visitors see without scrolling.
Do you know how to get the most out of that space?
Understanding what portion of your page most visitors see matters to YOU as an affiliate marketer. If your visitors don’t SEE the most important portion of your page without scrolling, you might be losing revenue.
The challenge you’ll find is that visitors to your site use different size browsers, different screen resolutions and different operating systems.

Google Labs has come up with a neat FREE tool that you can use to find out exactly where your prime website real estate is located. The tool is called “Google Browser Size”
According to Google, Google Browser Size “is a visualization of browser window sizes for people who visit Google. For example, the “90%” contour means that 90% of people visiting Google have their browser window open to at least this size or larger.”

The information is free. Go to http://browsersize.googlelabs.com/, type your website URL into the search box and find out what percentage of your website visitors are seeing the most important part of your page.
Check your own analytics! Making changes to your website design should not be based entirely upon the Google Brower Size information.
And if you want to learn more about optimizing your website and landing page, consider joining Affiliate Classroom.

From: http://blog.affiliateclassroom.com/2009/12/18/redesign-your-website-for-maximum-profits/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A
affiliateclassroom%2FktAa %28Affiliate Marketing Blog%29

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December 9th, 2009 | by Patrick Moran


Patrick Moran is chief strategy officer at Fuze Box, the company behind Fuze Meeting. He was also chief marketing officer at Mzinga, a leading social media and white label community provider, and led online marketing at Cisco WebEx. Fuze Box is one of the leading providers of real-time video collaboration tools today.
 
It’s no secret that online video is hot. A recent study by comScore revealed that in October 2009, more than 167 million viewers in the U.S. watched an average of 167 videos each, while YouTube reached 1 billion views per day – or 41 million views per hour – in the same month.


At my company, we’ve seen our own surge in video viewing. Video now accounts for the largest number of files uploaded into online meetings on our platform.

Given that many of our customers work in sales and marketing, what I infer from these numbers is that video marketing is poised for a huge year in 2010. The reason is clear: video simply engages people in a way that static text and images cannot. There are dozens of studies that show the power of video to boost customer interaction, drive sales, encourage viral sharing, and build brand awareness. And according to MarketingSherpa, 95 percent of the companies that have used online video marketing are happy with the results and expect to use it again in the future.

Luckily, it’s never been easier to create marketing videos. You can create videos for free using stock images and still photos on services like Jivox, or even transfer existing TV spots to the Web. You can also create screencasts on sites like Screenr in under an hour by recording voice over still images, screenshots, and slides. If you want to shoot your own video, you can edit the footage using sites like Pixorial or Jaycut. Of course, you can also hire a video production agency to create the videos for you.

Whatever type of video you create, make sure it’s short – under two minutes is usually best, but 30 seconds is even better. Simplicity is also key. Keep voiceovers straightforward and music at a minimum. If you want an example of the power of utter simplicity, check out the unique videos that explain hundreds of complex subjects produced by Common Craft.

Here are some great ways to use video to boost your business next year:

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1. Punch Up Your Web Site

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The easiest way get started is simply to embed your videos on your Web site. You can use YouTube to do this, or alternatives like Vimeo or Sorenson Media. Once you’ve got the videos playing on your site, make sure they are easy to share by adding a “share this” button on each video so that viewers can pass them along via Twitter, Facebook, and other viral channels. Already on Twitter, 8 percent of all shared URLs are links to videos on YouTube.

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2. Use Video to Sell

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We’ve found that our sales reps see 20 percent higher close rates when they play a video at the beginning of their virtual sales demo. Other online services report similar results: Jivox, an online video ad platform, used this video demo on their web site to increase registrations by 25 percent – they even embedded a signup form right on the demo page to collect registrations. You can also use services like Wistia to share a video with prospects and track how they interact with the video.

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3. Use Video in Your Online Ads

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Online video ads are growing in popularity because they are effective in driving sales. According to a study by the Online Publishers Association, 52 percent of people who watched an online video ad took action after viewing the ad, such as visiting the advertiser’s website (31 percent) or searching online for more information on the product (22 percent). A full 12 percent went on to make a purchase – giving video ads one of the highest conversion rates in the industry.

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4. Help Customers Get More Value Out of Your Product

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The power of video is that you can show prospective and existing customers your product instead of just telling them about it. At our company, we developed a short video that explains how to use our product. This has dramatically increased product usage for both online and mobile customers. Another great example is Jigsaw: they use crowdsourcing to gather and vet business contact information, a new approach that relies on customer participation. They’ve created a whole set of slick video tutorials on their site to make it easy for people to fully utilize the service.

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5. Go Mobile

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Make sure your videos can be viewed on many different devices. A good rule of thumb for whether you should modify your videos to work on mobile devices is: “If a video is worth sharing on Twitter, it’s worth making it mobile-phone-friendly,” since 40 percent of Twitter users access the service via mobile devices, according to an October 2009 study by Crowd Science. Already, there are more than 4.1 billion mobile phone users worldwide – at least 10 percent of which are video-enabled smartphones. Make sure these mobile warriors can view your videos.

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The Bottom Line

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Online video is a powerful tool in today’s marketing arsenal. With 2010 fast approaching, make sure your company has a clear video strategy in place that works alongside your online, social, paid media, PR, and other marketing strategies. Your customers want video, so give it to them!

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Dec 7, 2009

-By Georg Szalai

NBC Universal president and CEO Jeff Zucker on Monday said the media and entertainment industry is continuing to make slow progress in making money off content in the digital space.

He also said his team has underinvested in the NBC network, but has started correcting that as it looks to reverse NBC's fortunes.

"We have underinvested in development [at NBC Entertainment] over the last few years," he said. "That has been a mistake." He expressed hope for a turnaround in the coming years and said that would be an important goal with or without a sale of NBCU.

Zucker closed out the first day of the 37th annual UBS Global Media & Communications Conference, which Comcast chairman and CEO Brian Roberts had opened, to a full room.

One investor asked for an update to Zucker's famous comment a few years ago that for every analog dollar, media companies are making only digital pennies, which he had updated to dimes instead of pennies last year.

"We are making progress," Zucker said, but added the industry isn't quite at the level of digital quarters yet. "I'll give you a quarter, but I'll need a little change," he said. The industry is doing better every 6-12 months. "It's just not where it needs to be," he concluded.

After Comcast top executives earlier in the day said the system of local TV affiliates won't go away, one investor reminded Zucker that he had previously suggested there may be no more affiliates in five years.

"The affiliates system has served us incredibly well," but "has been under assault these last few years" as the digital revolution has taken its toll, he said. In the end, he signaled he may have to extend the time horizon he had mentioned in his previous comment.

Asked by reporters about the future of the Jay Leno Show after his appearance, Zucker said "we are not going make any quick decisions," even though his team will continue to look at the situation.

Zucker spent much of his on-stage appearance at the UBS conference touting the opportunities of the enlarged NBC Uni that last week's deal with Comcast, which is planning to take a 51 percent stake, would create.

"We will be a better company because of this move," Zucker vowed. "It gives us a bigger chess board to play with."

He did, however, not provide specifics beyond once again hinting at cross-promotion opportunities, getting more out of the combined sports networks and the ability to try out new business models in the digital age.

Speaking of sports: "Nobody should think this is another ESPN," Zucker echoed earlier comments from Comcast COO Steve Burke, to whom he will report, when asled if the combined NBCU and Comcast sports networks can take on Disney's sports juggernaut.

ESPN is "best in class," but capturing more money in the attractive sports business is still an upside opportunity for the enlarged NBCU, Zucker said.

He also gave his studio business a vote of confidence. While acknowledging the need to turn around Universal Pictures, which "had a bad year this year" because it spent too much on films that underperformed, he highlighted that the studio had its best and most profitable two years in 2007 and 2008. Overall, he predicted it will return to a strong performance.

Zucker also said his General Electric bosses have been "great stewards," but he is excited to work for a majority shareholder that is "100 percent focused on media."

Confronted with rumors that he may not stick around as CEO too long under Comcast's leadership, Zucker said: "They have asked me to stay on as CEO of the company...Yes, they have asked me. Yes, I have accepted. And yes, I am looking forward to it."

He said he knew the Comcast team before the deal, but got to know them really well over the past four months.

Zucker also faced the question of whether content and distribution can mesh well under the same roof due to failed past media mergers. Just because content and distribution haven't worked together in certain cases, it doesn't mean a combination can't work if managed right, he said.

He didn't answer if the Comcast-led NBCU will be the best-positioned media company beyond saying it will be "very well positioned."

Asked about NBC Uni's focus in recent years on building out its cable channel business, Zucker said the cable network business is a "superior" model, but the firm hasn't gotten full credit for that given the first three letters of its name. The company wouldn't have grown as nicely as it has if his team had not made the transformation, he added.

Zucker also drew some laughs when he congratulated UBS media and entertainment banking head Aryeh Bourkoff for helping to keep the Comcast deal under wraps for most of the year. UBS was a co-advisor to Comcast in the deal that had over the past two months become the industry's worst-kept secret.

Nielsen Business Media " - http://tinyurl.com/y98lxz9

The stand is up, the champagne is cooling, I think we're actually ready for EGR.

Got a week of industry events and hospitality ahead. Starts tomorrow morning with EGR Live - unfortunately I'm booked up for tomorrow so if you're not going to be there for the 2nd day of EGR grab me at the awards for a drink and chat.

The second day at EGR should be quieter with less meetings planned and more improvisation. In the evening there's the iGaming social event which takes place at Chinawhite's. On Wednesday I will be hosting a table at the AEGON Tennis Masters and finally on Friday I'll be attending the OLBG gathering at Sandown for a day of racing.

Looking forward to this week!

Facebook Marketing: IKEA’s Genius Use of Photo Tagging:


We talk a lot about how big brands are embracing social media as a mechanism to connect directly with customers. Still, it’s much easier to talk about integrating social media into your brand than it is to actually do it.


That’s why IKEA’s recent Facebook campaign is so awesome. The Swedish furniture company opened a new store in Malmo, Sweden and rather than spread the word the old-fashioned way, they decided to go directly to the people using Facebook.



This video describes the campaign in detail:







An account was created for the store manager at the Malmo store. Over a two-week period, showroom images were uploaded to his Facebook photo album. Using the all-popular “tagging” feature, customers were able to locate items in the pictures and put their name on it. The first person to tag an object got to take it home.

The word spread through Facebook and users started embedding links and images in their own profiles and across news feeds. In turn, thousands and thousands of users willingly promoted IKEA and its new store to others, creating a big win for IKEA.

[via CNET]

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It’s almost as if they’re on the same template with these three components:

• Something terrible has happened (sick family, lost job, bad investments, etc.).
• They found me on Google.
• How can they make money really fast in affiliate marketing?

I might as well set up a canned response in Gmail, because I invariably send them all the same answer, but with slightly different words.

I explain that affiliate marketing can be a great supplement to income, but it’s a slow grind to make that supplemental cash, and most people will quit before their first modest check.

Back in 1997 when I first got started as an affiliate, I had low expectations. After all, who was getting paid for putting up sites back then? Certainly not anybody I knew. They all had conventional jobs like me. We got on trains and commuted to the city.

But slowly, money started coming in. Not a lot, mind you, and it wasn’t proportionate to the time I was putting in. I might have averaged 50% of minimum wage my first couple months.

Then I was getting enough to pay for my hosting (a common goal for affiliates back in the 90s). I persevered, and other bills started getting covered. But I was way far away from making my affiliate action into a career.
At the same time, I was working a 9-5 on weekdays. I was also serving as the weekend sports editor for NJ.com (pulling down Newark Star Ledger sports stories by FTP and converting them from text to HTML – I got to write the headlines, too). This was 6am to 9am every Saturday and Sunday for $20/hour, and I was ecstatic to make such a grand rate.

I was also running a site for a ticket broker, and making online birth announcements by hand. I was scraping nickels and dimes where I could.

As time passed, I was able to drop some other projects and focus more on affiliate marketing. After a couple or three years, I was making more as an affiliate than I made at my first job.

That was hardly an overnight success – more like 1,000 overnights. All these years later (going on 13 as an affiliate), I supplement my income with affiliate action.

Long story short… if you want to make money as fast as I did, go out and work seven days a week, live lean, and be patient.

Oh yeah, and don’t buy those ebooks, videos, or whatever else that promise you the secret to fast money. Those are only fast money for the huckster selling them, and you’ll just be deeper in the hole.


Affiliate Marketing: Get Rich Slow or Never

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The Two Faces of Facebook

Steve Rubel on Digital Communications

By Steve Rubel
Published: October 29, 2009

LONDON, Oct 6 (Reuters) - British bookmaker Ladbrokes (LAD.L) has no current plans to bid for online rival 888 (888.L), sources familiar with the situation told Reuters.

A report in the Daily Mail newspaper on Tuesday cited market speculation of an imminent bid by Ladbrokes of 139 pence a share, valuing the business at around 480 million pounds ($764 million).

However, sources told Reuters no approach had been made and there was no prospect of one in the immediate future.

"It's rubbish. These are old rumours doing the rounds again," said one of the sources.

Ladbrokes and 888 declined to comment on the speculation.

(Reporting by Matt Scuffham; Editing by Victoria Bryan) ($1=.6279 Pound)

Source: Reuters

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In the beginning there were ISPs, which then gave way to portals ― aggregators of content and links ― which then led to the rise of “search” as the dominant form of Internet navigation or, how we get to where we we’re going on the web. However, as with most forms of evolution, change is constant, and over the past two years search navigation has appeared to shift to social media.

We continue to see that social media has not only changed the way consumers communicate and gather on the Web, but also impacted content discovery and navigation in a big way. But how? Is social media taking the place of portals and search as the hub of online navigation?

Nielsen goes on to categorize people as either ‘searchers’ who primarily get their data from search engines, ‘portalists’ who use a portal site to access data and ‘socializers’ who use, you guessed it, social media to get their information. As this last group grows there could be some significant implications moving forward for everyone who is using the Internet for business.


As a result the socializer group actually feels that there is too much information on the Internet. Much more so than those who simply use search engines. Think about it. A search engine user takes it on faith (the vast majority of the time) that the entire Internet for a keyword or key phrase is boiled down to just 10 best results. Of course, if they only take their online sophistication that far then the Internet does appear to be easy to manage. Socializers, on the other hand, spend a lot more time online and hear / see a lot more than regular Internet users. It can become very noisy very quickly.

So how do they manage this? Through their online social network of buddies, of course. At this point, now the real recommendations and buying decisions are happening based on what other people, not an impersonal engine says. Hopefully, they are giving actual experience to help their online connections make more informed purchasing decisions. That’s the theory at least. Take a look at the significant differences in how socializers and searchers use various formats for information. Why Wikipedia is even part of the discussion baffles me but what do I know?


So what are you? Searcher? Portalist? Socializer? A little of all of them. Will social media displace search engines as a primary source of information in the near future? What does it mean to you TODAY as an Internet marketer? Share your thoughts and let’s learn from each other.

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is sprucing up his blog. And about time it was.

But ComScore, Starcom Study Shows Banners Are Still Effective -- Especially When Paired With Paid Search

by Kunur Patel
Published: September 30, 2009


NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- The number of people online who click display ads has dropped 50% in less than two years, and only 8% of internet users account for 85% of all clicks, according to the most recent "Natural Born Clickers" study from ComScore and media agency Starcom. As the pool of people who click on banner ads rapidly decreases, it begs the question: Is the long-used click-through rate now officially useless?........


Source: http://adage.com/digital/article?article_id=139367

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